Tears in the Darkness (24 page)

The Air Corps boys were assigned to a flat sector not far from Manila Bay, roughly 1,500 yards of ground along the south bank of the San Vicente
River. Like the men on rest of the line, the Flying Infantry waited in foxholes, trenches, and bunkers that were topped with palm trunks, earth, and sandbags—all behind barbed wire and all protected with machine gun nests positioned to create curtains of impenetrable fire.

On a map, the main line looked solid, textbook bulwarks. On the ground, however, anyone with average eyesight and a modicum of military sense could see that most of the line was exposed. The trenches and bunkers had been set in the open instead of back in the jungle under the trees. Ben Steele and his Air Corps comrades and the rest of the 32,000 men guarding the east half of the peninsula were strung out under the sun like so much laundry, making it easy for Japanese air and artillery spotters to pinpoint their positions.
⁶

On Friday, April 3, the Japanese let loose with their heaviest barrage yet, concentrating their shells and bombs on the two Filipino divisions holding the vital center of the entire line. From nine o'clock in the morning until three o'clock in the afternoon, almost two hundred cannon, some averaging as many as fourteen rounds a minute, fired continuously on the same spot. The explosions churned the earth, splintered the bunkers, collapsed the fighting holes, and plowed up the trenches. Japanese bombers joining the attack dropped so many incendiaries that even the green undergrowth and immature bamboo began to burn. Soon the middle of the line was a miasma of flames, smoke, and shrapnel, a place where a man could not see past his hand, hear beyond the ringing in his ears, or draw a breath without choking on the gray smoke and orange dust that formed a dome over the battlefield.
⁷

Meanwhile, massed on the north bank of the Taiwir River and concentrated in front of the spot being pounded by Japanese planes and big guns was General Nara's refreshed 65th Brigade and the newly arrived 4th Division, both supported by tanks. The barrage lifted just after three o'clock, and, as Filipino medics were just beginning to pull the dead and wounded from their holes, thousands of
hohei
advanced on them. Came the whirlwind, came the Furies.

 

NOW IT WAS NED KING'S WAR
.

In March on the dock at Corregidor MacArthur had handed command of the islands to Lieutenant General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright, a cavalryman and the senior officer in the Philippines, and
Wainwright, in turn, named Ned King, a quiet major general from Georgia, to replace him as commander of the Luzon Force, all the troops on Bataan, which made King the man with the final word on the battlefield.

At first glance, others might have seemed more suited to lead a last stand—Major General Albert M. Jones of Massachusetts, for one, a tough-talking tactician from a family of warriors, or Brigadier General Clifford “Blinky” (for the muscle spasms in his face) Bluemel, a fierce infantryman from New Jersey who demanded his officers fight till they dropped.
⁸

King had been MacArthur's chief artilleryman, an adjuster of vectors, a plotter of parameters. He was good at what he did; Washington brass considered him one of the best cannoniers in the army. In January and February his big guns had shredded the Japanese, turning their attacks into shambles and forcing the battle into a lull.

King had grown up in Atlanta in the quarter century after Reconstruction, a son of the Old South with a lineage that led back to “the Lost Cause.” (His grandfather, Captain Gadsden King, had commanded one of the batteries of mortars and cannon that fired on Fort Sumter, the start of the Civil War.) Like other young men of his era and class, he was groomed to be a gentleman. In high school he studied the classics. At the University of Georgia he took up the law. When he graduated in 1903 he went to work for his Uncle Alexander at King & Spalding in Atlanta, and in his spare time he indulged in some soldiering with a local militia and an artillery group in the National Guard. He did well in the service, rose quickly in rank and, preferring the regimen and rituals of army life to the law, left his uncle's employ and in 1908 accepted a commission in the Regular Army.
⁹

He was a short, stout man with rust-brown hair and soft features, hardly a model of command. But he was smart and his training as a young lawyer had taught him to take care with details, a rare quality in the old army. By 1940 he was a brigadier general, regarded by his brother officers as even tempered and utterly reliable.
¹⁰

On Friday, April 3, at his headquarters on Bataan, a tar-paper shack in a jungle hollow near Mariveles, King, commander of all Filipino and American troops on the peninsula, waited for word from his front lines.

Some thirteen miles north of his command post, the Japanese were attacking the center of his main line of resistance, but the reports from
the field had been slow in reaching the general and he did not know whether the enemy had breached his line or whether his men were holding.

He'd done all he could to prepare, checked his lines, marshaled his reserves, tried to buoy his troops. Since he had nothing to offer them save himself, he visited them almost daily to buck up morale.

They had no chance of winning, of course, and Ned King knew it. The enemy was reinforced now, much too strong. His job, as one of his commanders described it, was “just a matter of holding on,” holding on “as long” as Ned King could.
¹¹

His men had been on the line for thirteen weeks and the accumulated angst and deprivations were beginning to cripple them. Their bodies—nervous systems, endocrine systems, immune systems—were shutting down, depriving them of the basic hormones a man needs to think, fight, and survive. The hardships of living in the wild and the exertion of patrolling and being on constant watch left them enervated. A week of continual bombing and shelling, as well as the anxiety that comes from witnessing the casualties created by that bombardment—a procession of mangled limbs, crushed skulls, eviscerated torsos—sent men into a kind of shock, a state of mind in which they became disassociated from the present and felt nothing save a dull throbbing behind their eyes and the deadweight of their own bodies.

Thousands crowded the field hospitals and aid stations. The addled, the wounded, the sick, men so enfeebled by disease and malnutrition they had to be dragged from their holes to be put on a litter. With the entire command—80,000 troops and 26,000 Filipino civilians and refugees—squeezed into small pockets of open space in an area less than 200 miles square and with so many enemy salvos and sorties every hour, almost every shell or bomb hit something, or someone. Soon a large number of men began to show symptoms of “nerve fatigue.”
¹²

They forgot their training, lost their bearing and composure. Some still had the moxie for a fight, but most were apathetic, anesthetized. Filthy, soaked in sweat, wracked with fever, living on rice mush, and cowering in their holes under the ear-splitting cannonade, they had reached the point where they just didn't give a damn.

 

ON APRIL
3
AT
3:00
P.M
., after five hours of constant bombardment concentrated on the middle of the American line, the Japanese attacked
the gap they had opened with their bombs and shells and pushed a thousand yards into the Filipino and American breastworks.

The intense bombardment shredded and burned telephone wires. In the rickety barnlike building of two-by-two timbers and tar paper that was Luzon Force Headquarters, General King had to wait until evening when runners arrived with the details of the attack.

The center of the line had been hammered. Bunkers considered bombproof were blown down like straw huts, trench walls collapsed, men were set afire in their fighting holes. Three Filipino infantry regiments (part of the 41st, and all of the 42nd and 43rd) tossed their rifles and packs and ran for their lives, terror chasing after them.
¹³

Their officers had tried to rally them, make them dig in and form a new line, but nothing could stop the stampede. They fled through the jungle and clogged the vital north-south trails needed to bring up reserves. No one at headquarters really blamed the Filipinos. Despite their perfunctory training, ancient rifles, coconut-husk helmets, and tennis shoes, many Philippine Army units had fought well throughout the campaign. And in the eyes of veteran American officers, even “the most seasoned troops would have been severely tried” by the fury of that opening bombardment.
¹⁴

Late in the afternoon, Ned King learned that his center was in danger of collapsing. The Japanese were pouring into the gap left by the Filipinos, and the enemy was heading for the strategic Pantingan and Catmon valleys, natural corridors to the American rear.

The next morning, April 4, King ordered out of reserve and into the action the all-American 31st Infantry. The regiment had seen only limited combat and had been holed up since February 8 in a bivouac in the rear, but they could hardly be considered fresh troops.

Sickness and semistarvation had reduced the 31st to two-thirds of its original strength, some twelve hundred men. When the orders came to join the fight, many of the troopers struggled up from their sickbeds to join their comrades, but four hundred men told their officers they were too far gone to make the march. Along the way others collapsed and had to be left by the side of the trail propped up against a tree with a canteen of water and a rifle in their laps.
¹⁵

On Sunday, April 5, General Wainwright came across the bay from Corregidor to take a look at Ned King's lines. He and his aide, Tom Dooley, arrived at King's compound as King and his staff were sitting
down to breakfast. Dooley stared hard at the faces in the mess tent and thought, “Morale seemed very low. In my eyes ‘DEFEAT' was written all over them.”
¹⁶

Around 10:30 a.m. the Japanese resumed their attack and finally captured the center, in effect driving a huge wedge into the American line. Now all the enemy had to do was pivot left, like opening a door into a room, to outflank Ned King, then sweep south and east though one sector of the line after another, driving the Filipinos and Americans ahead of them through the jungle and cane fields and across the rice paddies and swaths of cogon grass until they had their backs to Manila Bay.

That night Wainwright, King, and the other top American commanders decided to try to close the gap in the line with a counterattack.

In the early-morning dark on April 6, the counterattacking 31st Infantry started forward, but before the Americans could form fighting lines, they walked right into Japanese patrols. A battalion of the 31st, moving forward with fixed bayonets, ran into the Japanese at a trail junction and crumbled. The men tried to save themselves, tried to disengage and pull back, but the Japanese, as was their custom, pressed their pursuit and chased after the Americans. In the black of night with the enemy on their heels, the men of the 31st Infantry sprinted straight into a five-foot-high barbed-wire fence blocking the trail, and they panicked, a wild mob of American soldiers shrieking and wailing and dashing headlong into the dark jungle to save themselves.
¹⁷

News of the failed counterattack reached Ned King sometime after first light and he and his staff began to wonder how much longer their troops, more a muddle than an army, could put up a fight. Most units had disintegrated, and along the east half of the defense line, what was left of the force was being pushed back, and back again. King considered forming a new line in his rear, but he had no idea how many men he could count on to keep up the battle.

At midmorning he called his field commanders to his headquarters. Many of his men had simply disappeared into the bush, and the general asked each officer to gauge the effectiveness of the outfits that were still intact.

What did the general mean by “effective”? one officer wanted to know.

An effective soldier, King said, was one who could walk a hundred yards without stopping to rest, raise his rifle to his shoulder, take aim, and shoot at the enemy.
¹⁸

By that definition, the officers said, only fifteen men out of every hundred were fit to fight, and at the moment no one in the command shack could say exactly how many men were still under arms or in their fighting holes.

The Japanese were now threatening the extreme east section of the line, sectors manned by the Air Corps, the Flying Infantry. Another enemy attack force, the Nagano Detachment, was massing in front of them across the San Vicente River and was getting ready to push south through the paddies and fields and down the Old National Road.

At 7:00 a.m. on April 7, the Air Corps boys started to take incoming artillery, and in short order the Nagano Detachment, some four thousand well-rested
hohei
supported by tanks, attacked across the San Vicente, overran the Air Corps' forward outposts, and prepared to strike the Flying Infantry from the front.

 

“
FIX BAYONETS
!”

On the other side of the San Vicente River the 7th Matériel Squadron readied itself. Q. P. Devore checked his sidearm and made sure he had extra ammunition for his automatic rifle.

Stragglers from their sister Air Corps units were running through the 7th's sector yelling that the Japs were right behind them, which meant that the 7th had enemy closing in on it from the left flank and front. No way for them to hold now.

Ben Steele heard an officer shout at them to pull out. “It's every man for himself!” the officer said, but instead of joining the stampede, Ben Steele fell in with a group of men who had volunteered to hustle south and help man a new defense line.
¹⁹

They marched in the jungle all day, through the night, and into the early-morning dark. At last, sometime before 5:00 a.m. on April 8, what was left of the Provisional Air Corps Infantry, 1st Battalion, 7th Matériel Squadron took up positions on the slope of a steep hill just south of the Alangan River. Some men scraped out shallow holes, but most, Ben Steele among them, just dropped where they stood.